Thursday, 15 September 2016

C O G I T O + E R G O + S U M

In 1637 René
Descartes, coined
the term ‘Cogito ergo sum’ which is generally
considered to mean ‘I think, therefore, I am’. The idea of self-awareness was
explored centuries later by Alan Turing, who examined the concept of artificial
intelligence and the idea that a machine could think for itself, developing the
now famous ‘Turing Test’ which was intended to detect the presence of
machine logic in an interrogation scenario.

Nowadays
we are all familiar with the notion of machine intelligence, as science fiction
has explored the idea for decades, from Karel Kapeks 1920’s play ‘R.U.R’, to
Isaac Asimov's three laws of Robotics and his supercomputer ‘Multivac’, through
endless famous incarnations of robot characters on film and TV, such as
‘Robbie’, ‘Colossus’ and more recently
with Stanley Kubricks ‘A.I’ .

Technological
advances at home have almost caught up with science fiction, video games are
littered with incidences of game based artificial intelligence and robotic and
androidal characters. Microsoft recently introduced a phone based ‘assistant’
to rival Apple's groundbreaking ‘Siri’ –voice activated applications which respond in the fashion of a human
operator. Microsoft tapped into its hugely popular Xbox game community to use
the name of the main character from one of its largest franchises, the resident
artificial intelligence, ‘Cortana’ from the ‘Halo’ game series. I remember way back in 2001, when I had a mobile phone on the Orange network, that I had a 'personal assistant' on the contract then, by the name of 'Wildfire'. Back in 2005, Orange pulled the plug on the service due to its lack of uptake!

Cortana
is represented in Halo as a holographic construct in the form of a nubile young
woman with a sassy attitude and powerful intellect, carried around the game
environment by the booted and suited Master Chief, the mechanised transhuman
alpha male who is under the players control. Microsoft originally named the
application after the gaming heroine as an in-house joke, but due to the
popularity of the game and the character herself, the name was retained, along
with the eerie blue hue on the interface.

Possibly
one of the most infamous instances of fictional A.I is the paranoid
supercomputer in Kubrick’s masterwork ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. HAL 9000 is the coolly calculating operator of
the Discovery mission to Jupiter, overseeing all operational parameters of the
flight with an unwavering gaze from his cyclopean red eye.

HAL
was revealed to have been named by writer Arthur C. Clarke, from the letters
immediately following the acronym of the then computer giant; IBM – H,i – A,b –
L,m and today the groundbreaking company still leads in the development of
machine intelligence with WATSON, its flagship cognitive technology system, for
analysing data.

As
a big fan of sci-fi and robots in general, I was amazed to see the new film ‘Morgan’
– ostensibly about a new form of artificial intelligence in the form of an
android child – was being advertised by means of a trailer which had been
composed and edited itself, by an A.I.

IBM
tasked Watson to analyse the film and break down the scenes by virtue of their
emotional impact and tension and then transform the findings into a cinematic
trailer. Whilst it’s easy to get drawn into the action within the trailer, it’s
difficult to tell that it was actually edited without direct human intervention
and is actually quite good. Some of the edits are very harsh and abrupt, but
overall, the effect is tantalising and sinister.

It’s
interesting to note the intervention of technology based applications to perform
duties which would ordinarily be carried out by humans, but there’s a certain poetry about the use of an
A.I to advertise a work about an A.I. I’m sure that before long we will be
seeing complete films and other artworks being produced without human
influence, as machine intelligence becomes increasingly powerful.

Lets
hope the developments don’t lead us into the realms of science fiction
nightmares such as ‘The Forbin Project’, ‘Demon Seed’ or ‘The Matrix’…